52
by borderingonmanical
Summary: (Because outer space is just one big kingdom of isolation.) Anna pretends and Elsa is oblivious to all. (modern au) — [eventual elsanna]
1. supernova

**disclaimer** — I don't own _Frozen._

**warning(s)** — none. (yet.)

**notes** — the ss elsanna has claimed another victim. *shifty eyes*

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_i mean, fifty-two weeks is kind of a long time_

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_(but still not long enough, apparently)_

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**52**

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**prologue** — supernova

_[exploding into cosmic proportions]_

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Not that it mattered any, right? —

— Elsa was kissing a girl the evening her parents died.

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Elsa's parents were away on a business trip.

She and Alice were at a meadow that was right next to the Arendelle estate, in the night, underneath the stars — their cold, silvery light, stabbing downwards toward the earth.

Elsa had always loved the stars. So bright. So far. So _unattainable._

And she wanted to make them attainable. She wanted to be the first to be able to fly through the universe, skimming through all the stunning wonders it contained within its shadowy folds — cloudy, multi-colored nebulae; galaxies burning fiercely with the radiance of ten million suns.

She looked up, and she dreamed.

The grass was springy beneath her. Wet with the recent rainfall, the smell of freshness and spring permeating the air. It was easy to get drunk off of.

It was a game, at first. Antics brought back from the dusty cabinets of a child's fun.

"Truth or dare?" Alice asked, her pale white fingers absently brushing the very tips of the grass. Water droplets collected on her fingertips, before she flung them at Elsa with a teasing flick.

"Ah...," said Elsa, grimacing slightly as the cold water landed on her face, "Dare."

They were still for a moment, nothing but the sound of the wind tearing through the trees to break the heady silence.

Alice wasn't looking at her when she spoke.

"...I dare you to kiss me."

Elsa's head whipped to the side in apparent disbelief. "What?"

"I dare you to kiss me," and Alice turned this time, staring at Elsa with blue eyes that flickered with some hidden emotion.

_Apprehension?_

_Excitement?_

Elsa blinked. Looked at her hands, which were planted firmly on the grass below.

_It couldn't hurt, could it?_

The kiss was soft and slightly hesitant and it tasted of Coke, which made total sense because they had been sharing a can of the soda prior to coming outside.

And it was, Elsa decided soon afterward, very nice.

_More than nice._

Breathless —

"Actually...can we do it again?"

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It was strangely funny how when before they stepped back into the Arendelle manor, Elsa still had parents.

And right after they crossed the threshold, right when Gerda came bustling in to greet them and wrap a coat around Alice and send her off back to her home...

She didn't.

Didn't have parents.

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_("I had a bad dream."_

_"Oh, darling. What was it about?_

_"There were two people. They were in a crash. A really, really bad one. There was a big bang and an...explosion. Mommy, it was _scary."

_"...Elsa, you understand that it was only a dream, right?")_

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She wasn't there when her dream became a reality, but the pain was.

She was twelve at the time, young enough to still not have been in junior high yet but old enough to know that there had been an accident. A crash. A really, really bad one.

_Never coming —_

There had been a big bang and an explosion.

_Never coming —_

Two people, her parents, were gone.

_Never coming back._

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They came rarely, but her father gave the best hugs.

They came often, but she never got tired of her mother's smiles.

Their absence hurt like nothing else ever could.

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The funeral was absolutely gorgeous and absolutely horrifying at the same time.

For one, the shrouds were pretty. Made of smooth black silk that hung over the caskets like solid shadows, mirroring the somber atmosphere of the service precisely.

And then on the other hand, her parents were buried beneath all those pretty shrouds. White and dead, inside oaken caskets. Never to be touched by the light of day.

Never to be bathed in starlight again.

Her parents' oldest and best friend gave a long speech that was so heartbreaking everyone in attendance, except for Elsa, was weeping or sniffling by the end of the stupid thing.

She wondered distantly, was it a problem if she couldn't find the tears that were supposed to be there?

She stayed mute throughout the whole ceremony and watched as the caskets were lowered into the ground.

Turned her head away, because she couldn't bear to see her parents slowly crumble away from her life, one handful of dirt at a time.

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One night in her bed, Elsa looked out the window, saw the stars, and remembered something she shouldn't have forgotten in the first place.

And then she panicked. Fingers clenching tightly around her sheets, crimping the fabric into something unrecognizable. The tears she couldn't find at her parents' funeral came rushing out of her then in one great torrent, shaking her body uncontrollably as she wept. Broken, amorphous sounds came tumbling out past her throat, a threadbare wall that refused to waver and thin out, because —

_Before they went out._

_I forgot —_

_Before they crashed._

_I forgot —_

_Before they died._

_I forgot to tell them I loved them._

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People offered her food for comfort. Gerda and Kai collected them for her. Steaming casseroles, strawberry rhubarb pies, and piles of cookies.

They sat silently on the kitchen table in the manor, stagnant, collecting into an ever-growing stack of well-meant intentions.

Yet they laid abandoned and forgotten.

Their intended recipient sat crumpled in her mother's favorite wine-colored couch and stared vacantly at the monochrome beige-colored walls. She was drowning in leather, drowning in air, drowning in _life_ —

What little left there was of her world completely shattered when the doorbell rang.

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It was Alice.

For some reason unbeknownst to man, Elsa told Gerda to tell the blonde that she was napping.

She still hadn't forgotten their kiss, because how could she ever forget anything like that?

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She couldn't even talk anymore, except to Gerda and Kai.

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Days crept by in a blind stupor.

Nights were spent staring at the stars with tears leaking out the corners of her eyes.

Elsa did not improve.

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She found the book one day when she was wandering through her father's study.

A book about stars. A book about the cosmos.

So bright.

So far.

So _unattainable._

The stars.

_Unattainable._ Just like her parents. Still and silent in their grave, they were.

She had to make something attainable in her life, then. Something she could reach. Something that seemed so far, but would be so near.

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It quickly became an obsession.

These stars. These galaxies. This universe.

_Astronomy._

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[**next/** beginnings (i)]


	2. beginnings (i)

**disclaimer** — I don't own _Frozen._ / "queen of hearts" by _we the kings._

**warning(s)** — may be a bit confusing at the transition from beginning to middle. if you've got _any_ questions whatsoever, feel free to pm me.

**notes** — heyo, thanks for the comments about my, um, writing style. :P this chapter's a bit different, though...okay, maybe a lot. tell me what you think.

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_when the world falls into pieces,_

_you'll be the one voice of reason._

_when i can't face all my demons,_

_you are the one i believe in._

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_(when the future mirrors the past)_

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**present day**

It is some time around eleven o'clock a.m. during a sunny July twelfth when Anna begins to die a very slow and very painful death, next to a hospital bed.

_It isn't fair,_ she weakly tells herself.

Four words, four syllables. Completely inconsequential. It shouldn't have even mattered.

But coming out of Elsa's mouth, they do.

"Do I know you?" she warily asks midst a veritable jungle of wires and clear tubes and beeping machines.

_Bam_ — and that is that. Life ruined (again), so unthinkably easy.

Anna, to her credit, is properly struck dumb and doesn't have an answer to that introspective question, because this, _this_ is the awkward moment when she's having her midlife crisis at the tender age of eighteen.

It almost knocks her down onto the polished linoleum tiles below her. Her body — so brittle, so delicate; nothing more than a fragile vessel for her breaking soul — meets the earth with a metaphorical _crack,_ and she wonders distantly, is it bad if she can't even find it within her to care anymore?

Her voice catches in her throat, coalescing into a cancerous lump of words that she doesn't think she will ever be able to spit out. Then quickly averts her eyes, hands clenched into white fists in her lap.

_Only hurt her more, you idiot. You'll only hurt her more._

Elsa is still waiting patiently for an answer, her hands crossed lightly over her covered lap.

_Time to cut it off._

"No," Anna manages to get out.

She hadn't anticipated this. _No._ It hurts to say. It hurts to say so fucking much, the dents in her heart expanding by the miles until her inner walls can't take it any longer and she just _shatters_ into a pile of bleeding hopes and dreams that are never meant to be.

"...I see," says Elsa.

The blonde is looking downright uncomfortable.

"Um," Elsa softly says, and one of Anna's limp hands is being gathered within two icy cold ones, "are you...alright? Ah...who are you, then?"

_Why are you asking me that?_ the redhead wants to sob, letting the anguish slowly building up within her go, _Why are you asking me if I'm alright, when I should be asking you?_

But she doesn't say that.

Doesn't say anything of the sort.

Because for once in her life, Anna doesn't say anything. She keeps her mouth shut for the girl she loved, the girl she still _loves_. Lets her torment pool in her chest and drown her slowly, inch by inch, and doesn't claw for anything to heave her waterlogged spirit back to the earth.

"Um...?"

Elsa's still holding her hand.

"Anna," the redhead blurts out, blustering profusely. "My name's Anna. I, uh, I was one of the — uh, paramedics — who...found you. In the...fire."

If Elsa takes notice of her blatant stutter, she doesn't comment on it, only relinquishes her freezing grasp on Anna's hand.

"I see," she says again, and Anna's starting to really _hate_ the statement _I see_.

_You don't see, Elsa. I'm lying. I'm lying, I'm lying, I'm _lying,_ goddammit. Can't you tell?_

And apparently the blonde can't, because Elsa's still smiling politely at her, one of those smiles that says _Well, Anna, it was very nice to meet you_ and not the one Anna used to always be on the receiving end of, the one that said —

_I love you._

Anna stands up and quickly attempts to string together some parting words, "I — I — I hope you make a full recovery."

Elsa benignly smiles some more and is completely unaware of the absolute _torture_ the redhead is putting herself through —

"Thank you."

It is not a conversation between two lovers, but two strangers.

Anna hightails out of the room before she can break down into a sobbing mess.

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The doctors later tell her that Elsa apparently has _retrograde amnesia._

Wikipedia says that damage can be limited to the "CA1" field of the hippocampus region in the brain — whatever the hell that means — which would cause limited RA for one to two years. Or, if more extensive damage is done to the hippocampus, fifteen to twenty years.

Wikipedia also says that severe cases of RA, if damage in the brain resulted in large medial temporal lobe lesions (which apparently stretched from past the hippocampus to other regions of the brain), would cover around forty to fifty years.

Anna stops reading Wikipedia after that.

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_("What are you scared of the most in the world?" Anna asked._

_"...Me?"_

_There was a long pause, so long that Anna was sure that Elsa would never answer her._

_But the blonde just absently tugged at her braid and then responded, so unexpectedly —_

_"Fire." There was a slight shudder in her intake of breath. __"I'm scared of fire.")_

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In the end, when all is said and done, it is so, terrifyingly simple to convince the blonde that Anna had never been an influential part of her life.

_And it hurts._

_It hurts so __—_

Anna has really never been that interested in the astronomy that Elsa unabashedly adored, but she somehow finds herself dabbling in the subject in the long days that stretch after her visit, as if studying the science the blonde loved would ease the pain, if but a little.

_____— _fucking _—_

One day, leafing through the textbook Anna had seen Elsa reading the first time she ever saw her, she encounters a slip of paper marking page seven-hundred-twenty-nine.

___— _much.

Anna is an absolute mess of sticky snot and tears by the end, because the passage talks of the future of space travel and right after the last word, Elsa had apparently scrawled in her beautiful penmanship, a promise that she would never keep ___— _

_Always wanted to find a way. Perhaps a field of research after college?_

_Soon._

The last word rings hollow and empty in her ears.

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One accident, and everything she cherishes goes up into smoke. Burned into sooty ashes, smeared thickly over the ground in the bleak aftermath.

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She cries like she has never cried before into her pillow that night.

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_through the thunder and the rain,_

_together we fall, together we fly away._

_hold me closely,_

_you are my one and only..._

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_(turned me completely inside out)_

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**52**

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_(weeks ago)_

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**part one** — earth

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**week one** — beginnings (i)

_[the end of the world]_

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It was some time around eleven o'clock a.m. during a sunny July twentieth, in a cheery coffee shop, when Anna began to die a very slow and very painful death.

It wasn't _fair,_ she weakly told herself_._ She had been minding her own business, for once; perfectly content with drinking her coffee and pretending to do summer reading on Machiavelli's _The Prince_ while Kristoff agonized over the Sunday crossword puzzle next to her. Out of sheer boredom, she'd looked up and over her brother's blond mop of hair...and then...

_Bam_ — that was that. Life ruined, so unthinkably easy.

The girl, the one sitting in the very corner of the coffee shop was undeniably _gorgeous,_ even if she had her nose stuck inside what seemed like a huge abomination of a science textbook. Bangs pushed away from her forehead with some flyaway strands drifting off in various directions, the rest of that hair tied in a messy braid — although no one would call it hair anymore, it was called tresses — and the color was so _blond_ that in the fierce glow of the late morning sun it looked almost white, white gold.

What did they call white gold again?

_Platinum._

The girl had fucking _platinum-colored hair._

Anna didn't even know that that was possible.

And then the girl shifted in her seat, sitting up straight and blinking impossibly blue eyes for the briefest moment as if to stretch her back. The sunlight streaming into the café illuminated her face, and right at that moment, Anna could swear she was looking at a high goddess come down to earth.

_Sweet mother of god..._

"Kristoff," she hissed, abandoning all pretense of feigning interest in Chapter Seven and instead focusing her attention on abusing Kristoff's right shoulder, _"Kristoff!"_

"Yeah...?" He sounded distracted; didn't even bother to look up from his puzzle. "Wait. Just give me a minute."

A blissful moment of silence ensued.

_"Kristooooff,"_ came the pleading whine.

The boy in question chewed pensively on the end of his pen and wrote down _cucumber_ in one of the answer columns.

Anna ended up "accidentally" knocking her latte all over Kristoff's crossword, which elicited a surprised yelp from the blond.

"Christ, Anna, what was that for?"

The redhead didn't bother to feign innocence, "Kristoff, who's that girl sitting over there?"

Kristoff grumbled something incomprehensible but looked "over there," which was essentially the entire left half of the Starbucks café.

"Care to be more specific?" he deadpanned, turning his attention to trying to sop up the lukewarm coffee from his ruined puzzle as best as he could.

"The blonde!"

"There are lots of blondes here," and Kristoff raised an unimpressed eyebrow, pointing to himself before tilting his head toward the middle-aged, slightly overweight patron sitting at the booth to their immediate left.

Anna grabbed Kristoff's arm unceremoniously and heaved it up to the left so that it was dangling limply in the air like a sodden rag.

"There!"

Kristoff humored his little sister and followed the line of his arm into the very corner of the coffee shop.

"Are you referring to the blonde that's reading a textbook so large that it should have been downright illegal for the thing to be published in the first place?" he asked, because that textbook the pale girl was hunched over had to be at least ten thousand pages long.

"Yes!"

Kristoff mentally debated for a moment whether or not he should be worried that his sister seemed to only be capable of spitting out one- to two-worded responses by this point.

"Right. What about her? Also, can you...?" Kristoff shook his captured right arm for emphasis.

"She's _gorgeous,"_ Anna dreamily said even as she abruptly let go of his limb and happily let it drop down into the puddle of coffee spreading across the table the two siblings sat at.

Kristoff examined the cold brown liquid that was now sending exploratory forces up the sleeve of his formerly pristine white shirt. "Wow, Anna, thanks for ruining my clothes."

"You're welcome," Anna said in a tone that clearly professed how disinterested she was in her brother's predicament. "What's...her name?"

Kristoff frowned. "Wait, who, me?"

Anna flapped an excited hand at him. "Yeah, you!"

"Why would I know her name? I only just _noticed_ her because you pointed her out to me!"

"She's gorgeous," his sister repeated, her mind somewhere far off in a place full of sunshine and chocolate that could only be called Anna-land.

"You can only see the top of her head and her giant-assed textbook and you're calling her gorgeous," said Kristoff. "Now, that makes perfect sense, doesn't it?"

Her reply was absent-minded and absolutely moony. "It _does."_

There was obviously no arguing with Anna by this point.

Kristoff peeled his ruined crossword off from the table and sighed.

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The black coffee, still piping hot, spit fragrant white steam into the air, stinging her nose with its pungent scent. Waves of chatter rose and fell all around her, a never-ending cycle of white noise in the background.

Elsa absentmindedly twirled her writing utensil around her fingers, left fingers tapping out a random beat on the linoleum table beneath her as she considered the prompt in front of her; something concerning three thought experiments at ordinary speeds, then two at high speeds, in free-float frames.

Shuffling tiredly through her notes on relativity, she blindly reached for her drink, still eyeing the assignment in front of her with a blatant degree of animosity. The coffee burned its dark and bitter way down her throat, liquid fire rolling through her mouth. Licking her lips, she finally set her pencil to paper:

_Thought Experiment #1_

_Imagine that you are floating freely in a spaceship. Because you feel no sensation of motion, you perceive yourself to be at rest, or traveling at zero speed. As you look out your window, you see your friend in her own spaceship, moving away at a constant speed of 90 km/hr. How does the situation appear to her?_

_We can answer the question by logically analyzing the experimental situation. Your friend has no reason to think she is moving. Like you, she is in a flee-float frame, floating freely in a spaceship with the engines off. Therefore, your friend will say that _she _is at rest and _you _are moving away from her at 90 km/hr._

_Both points of view — yours and your friend's — are equally valid. You both would find the same results for any experiments performed..._

She bit her bottom lip in vexation before looking at her textbook — and really, the professor could have chosen so much better than this one, because the current one in front of her now did absolutely _nothing_ to explain free-float frames as she needed it to — without taking a single soporific word in, then proceeded to glare death at an innocent picture of NGC 1376.

Elsa glanced up from her writing, stretching out her cramped back and staring blankly at the ceiling; then, she looked idly across the café and promptly dropped her pencil.

_Well...this might be an actual problem._

That strawberry blonde girl, the one sitting all the way over in the other side of the coffee shop, was staring at her.

Again.

It was the second time in five minutes Elsa had caught the girl craning her neck, trying to get an eyeful of her. Oh, the girl was _pretending_ not to, hiding behind her measly little thing of a book once every two seconds; however, Elsa could see inquisitive teal eyes peeking up from past the edge of well-worn pages and gawking right at her.

It was disconcerting, to say the least.

She quickly ducked her head.

For quite like the majority of the human population, Elsa Arendelle did not like it when strangers ogled her, especially when she was trying to concentrate on her work.

She disliked it, actually, more than other people. She felt so terribly self-conscious every time she caught someone even so much sparing a passing glance at her.

She wasn't sure what happened, but her parents' deaths had broken something inside of her. Something that had been fragile already, and was now beyond repair.

_Forgot to tell them I loved them._

Elsa swallowed thickly and mentally cursed.

_Why are these memories coming up _now? _What was I ever doing that brought them up in the first place?_

Her neck was prickling irately. She was practically sweating by this point, and she swore she could feel a set of burning teal eyes on her face.

She stared, quite blankly, at a sentence in her textbook. Looked without reading. Looked without seeing.

_Trapped. Trapped. Trapped._

The only reason she came to this place anyway was for the coffee and the ample _protection_ a horde of humans provided_._ She as in individual was lost in the influx of people rushing in and out of the shop. Here, no one paid attention to her. Here, no one _knew_ her. No one looked at her and judged her and referred to her as _that girl whose parents died in a car crash._ Here, she was simply another student who frequented the café for coffee and to do her studies.

She was visible, and completely invisible at the same time.

In contrast, the Arendelle manor felt like a terrifying trap. There, _everything_ gave her their full, inanimate and undying attention. She couldn't go a step without feeling as if eyes were peering at her around the corner. She loved silence, but the silence inside the manor was nothing more than stifling and oppressive. She loved to be alone, but to be alone in that house, _her parents' house,_ shook her to the very core of her being.

It still did, even after seven years. Still felt haunted, the ghosts of years long past whirling around her in an everstorm.

Sometimes, she would see open eyes, reflecting the watery light of the sun or moon filtering in through the window in her room, but they would be empty and hollow, colder than winter's embrace. She would see pale, milky hands, blue veins traced in stark relief against a pale porcelain canvas made of icy flesh and skin.

It scared her more than she cared to admit, these hallucinations of her parents' dead bodies.

It was all her mind, she knew. She had never seen the corpses. Couldn't bear to. Didn't _want_ to. Knew that they would be frozen in time, forever remaining at the age they had died.

She could only imagine how they looked, and Elsa sometimes wondered about her sanity, because did normal people's imagination tend to lead them to gruesome scenarios of pale, lifeless bodies?

She cried at night still, when there was no one to see her, no one to judge her; she wept for all she had lost, wept for all _they_ had lost. Groped madly for any wisps of old memories — memories of happier, halcyon days. She secretly kept a shit ton or two of photos in her room.

But even they were not enough to stop the encroaching tendrils of time dipping slyly in the banks of her memories. She was terrified when she forgot what her father's voice sounded like, when she forgot what perfume her mother used to wear.

It was never good enough. They always remained as an arm's length, fuzzy images superimposed faintly onto curling, yellowed paper. Irony must have loved to play with her life because her birthday had been _just a few days away_ and the funeral itself _was_ indeed held the day she was born, on the darkest day of the year.

_Winter solstice. December twenty-first._

Her work was forgotten.

Coffee stagnant and still.

She pressed her trembling fingers to her temples.

_Oh, no. No, no, no, don't panic, don't panic — conceal, don't feel...conceal,_ don't feel_—_

_— fuck._

They were always too distant.

Always too faded.

_Always too dead._

Elsa slammed her textbook shut with shaking hands, rattling her coffee cup and scaring the three identical little boys seated in the booth next to her out of their wits, all of whom _still had a mother_ — who was now glaring at the blonde in a very reproachful manner — and she knew she was being puerile, knew she was being selfish, but it didn't stop her chest from _aching _like hell.

She almost stumbled over her own feet in her haste to stand. Slipped her sheaf of notes into a black messenger bag and tucked her course book underneath her arm, then scampered from the shop as fast as her legs could carry her.

A blue mechanical pencil and a rapidly cooling coffee lay forgotten on the table in her wake.

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"Aww...she left."

"She left her pencil, too."

"Wait..._really?!"_

Anna was up in a flash.

Kristoff rolled his eyes.

"Girls..."

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Monday morning, Kristoff woke with a sound that was halfway between a grunt and a moan to the feeling of something cold and wet dripping on his ear.

_"Gooood morning!"_

Kristoff cracked open an eye, focused in on an enormous banana-split grin hovering two inches above his face, and immediately fell off his mattress with a yelp, his blankets tangled uncomfortably around his legs.

"Oh my — holy shit, Anna, what the _hell_ are you doing?"

"Waking you up," his little sister giggled, skipping around Kristoff's room like she was playing ring around the rosy before she apparently hit her toe on the foot of his bed and hopped back into his dresser, swearing loudly. "Ow!"

"Karma," Kristoff yawned, rubbing languidly away at his eyes. "Whuzzappened? Who's dead?"

"No one's — _ow!_ — no one's dead, why would you ever — oh, jeez...sorry," (because she had apparently knocked over one of Kristoff's many hockey accolades), "sorry, sorry — umm, why would you ever think that?"

Kristoff took a moment to string together Anna's disjointed words in his head.

"You're never awake before noon unless there's some sort of international Anna emergency, like if there's no more chocolate in the pantry. What time is it, anyway...?"

And Kristoff's eyes nearly popped out of his head as he stared at the small clock resting peacefully on the top of his nightstand.

"What the _fuck,_ Anna!"

"What?" the redhead whined, still rubbing her smarting toe.

"Why — why would you _ever _— _four-oh-two in the morning?!"_

"I couldn't sleep," and Anna bounced onto his mattress, the gigantic grin starting to spread across her face again.

"Why not?" groaned Kristoff, pulling his pillow over his head.

"Because...um..._reasons."_

Kristoff squinted at his little sister for about two seconds and then almost had a coronary.

"Jesus Christ, Anna, you're _still_ hung up over blondie?"

_"...Well. _When you put it that way..."

"You woke me up at four in the morning...for _what,_ exactly?!"

"Four-oh-_two,"_ stressed Anna.

"Oh, wow. Big difference!" Kristoff threw his hands up into the air from sheer exasperation.

"So, brother of mine. You're going to help me give her the pencil back, right?"

Kristoff's head dropped into his hands.

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"I never signed up for this," he found himself saying precisely five hours and sixteen minutes later, when Anna pushed him into the same coffee shop they had been at yesterday.

He spared a glance toward the left corner of the coffee shop and almost groaned in exasperation, because _blondie_ was sitting right there with her fat-ass textbook in tow, and there was no way in hell he was going to get out of this dangerous situation now.

Anna was still oblivious to Kristoff's mental agony. "Well, I mean, you never answered me, so I took that as a yes!"

"Generally," and Kristoff felt himself turning a shade of warm red when he realized that there were patrons in the little shop staring at him being bullied into submission by a red-headed girl two heads shorter than him, "when I try to whack you around the midriff with a pillow, it means that I am not open to your current idea."

Not perturbed in the slightest, Anna mercilessly dragged him along behind her.

_Oh my god. All this for a damn pencil._

"If you like her, why do you have to bring _me_ along?" His lips tightened imperceptibly.

Anna's voice was dignified.

_"You're_ here for moral support."

The sound of Kristoff's hand meeting his face could probably be heard throughout the whole café.

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Elsa had plowed her way through two more thought experiments when her pencil hit her on the nose and then fell benignly onto her lap.

It took her a few seconds to realize what had hit her, so absorbed in her work she was. Picking the mechanical pencil up, which she had not been able to find yesterday, she looked up out of instinct, a thank you ready on her lips.

And then she blanched.

And nearly had a coronary.

_Holyohmygodwhatisshedoinghere?!_

"Oh, crap — crap, I'm so sorry, I didn't mean for that to happen!" the strawberry blonde who had unashamedly stared at her yesterday babbled, her face morphing into one of sheer horror even as she quickly looked away.

Elsa gaped dumbly back, which apparently only convinced the poor girl that she had done something of unspeakable fault even further.

"Are you okay? I mean, um, it was a pencil, but I still didn't mean to — you know, fling it at your face — I, um, I mean, you forgot it yesterday when you left, like in a real hurry." Then, in a smaller voice, "Oh, god, that sounded stalker-ish."

Teal eyes met cold cyan.

Elsa was dying internally and she had no idea why. The girl wasn't even _scary._ Wasn't imposing. She was only giving Elsa back her forgotten _pencil._

But she was going to have nightmares tonight, for sure. Tens of thousands of teal eyes, blinking at her from every direction in the stifling darkness.

_Trapped._

_You're insane._

_Trapped._

_Why are you so fucking _scared?

_Trapped._

The girl was saying something. Elsa could see her mouth moving, those eyes wide with concern, but she couldn't hear anything but her heartbeat pulsing a violent rhythm in her ears.

The girl stopped talking and extended a tentative hand.

And then Elsa's mind completely blanked, and she did just about the worst thing she could have done at that time.

She bolted.

.

Anna had been called everything from annoying to zealous in all her eighteen years of life, but _scary_ had never been one of them.

But this blonde, this girl, she was looking at Anna as if she was a serial killer. Wide, impossibly blue eyes that danced with fear and absolute terror, chest heaving, hands twitching erratically on the table.

"Hey," Anna whispered nervously, leaning in slightly closer. _Oh my god, is she having a panic attack or something? What the hell is happening?_ "Hey, I didn't mean to..."

The blonde almost unconsciously shrank back, pupils dilating in absolute terror.

There were people staring by this point.

"Oh, god, are you okay?"

No response. Kristoff tugged apprehensively at her elbow — "Anna, we should go..." — but she shook him off.

"Hello? Hey — hey, are you okay?" Anna started to extend her hand, which was definitely _not_ the right thing to do.

The blonde twitched once and then practically _flew_ from her chair with a strangled gasp, shoving the door to the shop open and sprinting down the street, and then she was just..._gone._

There was a long and awkward pause after the blonde had dropped everything and ran.

"Well," Anna meekly said, sitting heavily down onto a chair, "this is certainly a new development."

.

Elsa often liked to stare at the lone, minuscule crack on her ceiling after her tears had stopped bleeding into her pillow.

There were odd times, strewn randomly over the course of a month or two, when her shoulders had suddenly lurched forward without any warning whatsoever into a series of punishing, painful heaves, her fingers fisting themselves numb into her covers, because she _couldn't_ and she _wouldn't_ hold her anguish back anymore. The cracks in the faҫade she wore in front of the world only grew wider and more prominent as time crept past, until she was no more than a pile of shattered glass bits on the ground.

It was during these moments when Elsa completely shut herself down and hastily retreated in the darkest, bleakest realms of her mind, and it's almost an impossibility to climb out because she was just so _dead_ and everyone else was just so _alive._

Gerda and Kai would turn a blind eye to her behavior, for in vain they had tried to comfort her before — but they had long since learned that they were not supposed to wake the heir to Arendelle Incorporated up when she screamed out in the middle of the night from raging nightmares. Because the first time they had done it, their charge had leaped out of bed and attempted to hightail out of the room, still trapped in whatever gross nightmare had ensnared her, before cracking her head against the wall — because behind the tears and closed lids, she was watching her parents live out their final, rattling breaths.

.

She used to be a girl with the driest of humors and sharpest of personalities.

Then her doorbell rang and reality came knocking on her door.

.

Elsa sometimes wondered if her reasons for mourning over her parents was justifiably honest.

In the end, she wasn't sure if her tears were for them, or for herself.

_Selfish_ —

Nights when she couldn't sleep, and it was not because of her parents' deaths — dreams of the faceless panel of her father's advisers were a regular occurrence —

_Selfish_ —

She was an introvert by nature, she didn't _do_ the whole _talking to people_ thing — oh, she'd talk alright, but she'd rather be wonderfully, gloriously _alone_ —

_Selfish_ —

.

She liked to be outside. Liked watching the stars.

She did not like watching her father hunched over a desk inundated with paperwork.

.

_Lying under right your nose —_

.

She knew didn't want to take over as CEO.

She _wanted_ to be an astronomer.

.

(Then again, when had her wants ever triumphed over her needs?)

.

_Have to carry on the legacy of the Arendelle name __—_

.

She was an only child.

Her parents were dead.

.

_They left you the company to run._

.

.

After her parents had died in the summer of seventh grade, Elsa was always known as _that girl whose parents died in a car crash._

She couldn't even walk down the hallways without clusters of people edging away from her path, sympathetic eyes resting upon her as she moved through the suddenly dead corridors, her face as drawn and blank as a ghost's. Every student in the school had offered their most sincere condolences at least a hundred times already and Elsa had gotten quite sick of it all, sick and scared, to the point when she started to dread plodding through the hallways at the middle school, and then being in public areas in general.

Everyone except her thought it would be a great idea to go down to the guidance office every day to _talk about her feelings,_ which were _surely shaken after the traumatizing even that had just befallen your most esteemed family._

Elsa rebuffed every attempt people employed to try and get close to her and threw herself into her studies instead.

Emerged as an all-around top student in mathematics. English. History. Biology. She paid attention to them all, the core curriculum —

— but astronomy never strayed far from her mind.

.

It was around this time when Elsa started to try her hand at musical composition.

Music had been sort of a therapy to her the way guidance counselors who _wanted to talk to her about her feelings_ never could have been, and really, it had started out small. She came up with little melodies in her head while she was studying biology, which for some awkward reason she hated with a burning passion, tapped out random rhythms and syncopations on her large wooden desk. She listened to everything she could get her hands on, from Beethoven and Rachmaninoff and Gershwin; pop and dance and dubstep and house; relatively obscure electronic artists like The M Machine and more mainstream ones like Skrillex.

She dabbled in this superficially at the most, still absorbed with astronomy she was, but she found herself buying some MIDI sequencer program cheap for experimentation. She certainly found it fun and relaxing enough after a whole day of walking around school with the feeling that everyone was always _staring_ at her. Hundreds of pairs of eyes, scrutinizing every step she took, every move she made, and the thought — whether it was true or not; she didn't care about any of that, except for the _feeling_ that it was a reality — absolutely wrecked her.

Yes, most of the human population generally disliked it or found it uncomfortable when they caught a stranger eyeballing them.

Elsa found it completely terrifying.

.

.

[**next/** ethereal]

* * *

**notes 2 **— why hello there exposition / I think I almost killed myself cranking this chapter out in two days. later updates will probably be less frequent than this.


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